Kashmiri

Kashmiris are the Indo-Aryan people of the Kashmir Valley, a fertile Himalayan basin. Their land passed under the Mauryas when Ashoka founded Srinagari, and reached an imperial peak in the eighth century under the Karkota king Lalitaditya Muktapida. The same age made Kashmir a seat of Sanskrit learning and non-dualist Shaivism, written in the Sharada script.

After Queen Didda and the Lohara dynasty, Shah Mir founded a Muslim dynasty in 1339. Islam spread through the valley over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and Persian became the court language.

In 1586 the Mughals annexed Kashmir and emperors from Akbar to Aurangzeb laid out gardens. From 1753 the Afghan Durranis held the valley until the Sikhs under Ranjit Singh took it in 1819. The Kashmiris kept their Dardic Koshur tongue and poets such as the fourteenth-century mystic Lal Ded.